Monitoring your brand. Its a phrase brought up by marketers, yet no one thinks about how non profits or non technically inclined individuals should be monitoring their brand online.

Why is this overlook important? Well, the definition of a brand is how others remember you. In general you are asking the public to remember you  for a donation, for purchase a service, or for purchase from your inventory when your nearby competitor has the same product (and these days, everyone online is a nearby competitor!).

So lets assume that you have added a Google Analytics account to your website. If so, youre half way to monitoring your data and your brand. To get that other essential half, try the following few starter ideas for digging into the reports without getting too overwhelmed.

1. Schedule a reporting time  minimum once a month review with the analytics reports. Expect more frequency if you are using paid search or other budgeted media for marketing.
2. Set Goals in your analytics account  Set the pages and webpage actions that relate the site to your objectives.
3. Set visits by geography if your business or nonprofit is covering a specific region. Geography reporting can be the easiest to understand, if your business is marketed to certain regions. Review if traffic consistently lined up with where the business is marketing.
4. Look for trends over time. Examining where data comes from will narrow down what actions to take to strengthen or adjust.
5. Look at affinity reports to see what other topics of interest that attracts visitors and are receiving your visitors after they have visited your site. The reports can spark ideas for Adwords campaigns by lifestyle to sites that are suitable partners for increasing exposure to your site and brand.
6. If you are receiving regular reports from an analytic practitioner, ask for the meaning behind a report or metric definition. They should be following along your business at some level, and making.